The harshest book reviews of the year - in pictures

The harshest book reviews of the year - in pictures

From the 'repellant arrogance' of AN Wilson to Martin Amis 'serving up blanched stereotypes on the silver platter of his prose' – take a look at some of the poisonous pens in contention for
the Omnivore's Hatchet Job of the Year award

Tuesday 8 January 2013 10.44 EST
First published on Tuesday 8 January 2013 10.44 EST

Craig Brown on The Odd Couple: The curious friendship between Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin,

by Richard Bradford (Mail on Sunday) "It is a triumph of ‘cut and paste’ – indeed, such a triumph that by now Bradford must be able to press the Command button and C for Copy simultaneously in his sleep [...] It looks new, and it smells new. It has a new cover and even a new publisher. But Bradford has taken us all – and presumably his new publishers, too – for a ride. And he might have got away with it, but for the diligence of Inspector Brown..."

Camilla Long on Aftermath by Rachel Cusk (The Sunday Times)

"The book is crammed with mad, flowery metaphors and hifalutin creative-writing experiments. There are hectic passages on Greek tragedy and the Christian concept of family, as well as fragments of ghost stories, references to the Anglo-Saxon heptarchy, and heavy Freudian symbolism, including a long description of the removal of a molar, 'a large tooth,' she writes portentously, 'of great…personal significance'. The final chapter is an out-of-body experience – her situation seen through the eyes of her pill-popping Eastern European au pair. Oddly, I read the whole thing in a Bulgarian accent."

Richard Evans on Hitler: A Short Biography by AN Wilson (New Statesman)

"It's hard to think why a publishing house that once had a respected history list agreed to produce this travesty of a biography. Perhaps the combination of a well-known author and a marketable subject was too tempting for cynical executives to resist. Novelists (notably Mann) and literary scholars (such as J P Stern) have sometimes managed to use a novel angle of approach to say something new and provocative about Hitler, the Nazis and the German people. However, there is no evidence of that here, neither in the stale, unoriginal material, nor in the banal and cliché-ridden historical judgements, nor in the lame, tired narrative style; just evidence of the repellent arrogance of a man who thinks that because he's a celebrated novelist, he can write a book about Hitler that people should read …""

Ron Charles on Lionel Asbo by Martin Amis (The Washington Post)

"Don’t low-bred people say the darndest things!? I haven’t laughed so hard since my butler got his head stuck in a bucket... As Amis’s class mockery curdles, we’re left with a misanthropic vision of human suffering compounded by venality and lust. The novel’s meandering middle section has the grating tone of an episode of 'The Beverly Hillbillies' sketched on the back of an envelope by England’s finest stylist...[Amis is] ambling years behind The Situation and the Kardashians, serving up blanched stereotypes on the silver platter of his prose as though it contained enough spice to entertain or even shock. “

Claire Harman on Treasure Island by Andrew Motion (Evening Standard)

"It’s not just that [the] plot is both boring and implausible, the characters as wooden as absent Silver’s leg and the sentiments screamingly anachronistic (the good guys are all 21st century liberals), but at every turn the former Poet Laureate clogs the works with verbiage. Every act of senseless violence Jim witnesses prompts a gem of cod philosophy or a reverie on his mental state and at every crisis a dreamlike inertia takes hold, as if the characters all sense that the author lacks the correct co-ordinates …"

Suzanne Moore on Vagina by Naomi Wolf (Guardian)

"My problem with Wolf is longstanding and is not about how she looks or climaxes – but it is about how she thinks, or rather doesn't. She comes in a package that is marketed as feminism but is actually breathlessly written self-help. Her oeuvre, if I can use this word, is basically memoir, in which she struggles to tell some heroic truth that many others have already told us. The great trick is to present this material as new, and to somehow speak on behalf of all women when she is infinitely privileged and sheltered [...] It's like lesbianism never happened, nor class, nor vast swaths of feminist theory […] So much of Wolf's work is utter drivel – and I say this as someone in possession of the sacred feminine 'force'. "

Allan Massie on The Divine Comedy by Craig Raine (The Scotsman)

"The book is full of what I suppose is wordplay about 'coming' and 'going' in a sexual context, about circumcision and the pudenda, about masturbation and fellation , about farts and the various forms of sexual congress, all named – boldly? proudly? It grows wearisome, very quickly. 'Don’t write naughty words on walls if you can’t spell,' sang Tom Lehrer. Raine can spell. That much must be admitted."

Zoë Heller on Joseph Anton by Salman Rushdie (The New York Review of Books) "A man living under threat of death for nine years is not to be blamed for occasionally characterizing his plight in grandiloquent terms. But one would hope that when recollecting his emotions in freedom and safety, he might bring some ironic detachment to bear on his own bombast. Hindsight, alas, has had no sobering effect on Rushdie’s magisterial amour propre. An unembarrassed sense of what he is owed as an embattled, literary immortal-in-waiting pervades his book."